Sen. Amy Klobuchar had an answer ready for local journalists who asked her this week about the fiasco in a human trafficking bill that held up the confirmation of attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch because of an abortion provision.

“No one is really looking back at the past,” she said when asked about a mistake in her office that allowed the abortion provision into the bill.

Of course, someone’s always looking at the past in politics and in this story, it’s Politico, which this week provided a behind-the-scenes look at the snafu, for which Klobuchar said she took full responsibility while blaming the mistake on a staffer.

That, Politico said, is a move “that’s generally frowned upon in the Senate.” It’s not the first time the senator has blamed a staff member for a problem, however.

But it worked. Yesterday morning, a smiling Klobuchar was on the front page of the Star Tribune, the story framed as a breakthrough for bipartisanship.

“We’ve been able to work across the aisle,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a quote emblazoned above the Klobuchar article. He was the lead GOP negotiator in unwinding the impasse.

Compare that quote to the one in Politico.

“There was a lot of angst over this because it was hidden in plain sight. And you have a bunch of high-priced, elite, law school-educated staff who surely can read it,” Cornyn said. “I just don’t find that plausible.”

According to Politico, Senate leaders in Klobuchar’s own party pushed her aside, worried that having made the blunder, she was in too big a hurry to make it go away.

During the closed-door lunch last month in the Senate’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, what irked some senators was Klobuchar’s initial refusal to take responsibility for the error, according to lawmakers who described the exchange. She pointed to the number of aides and Democrats who serve on the Judiciary Committee who pored over the bill and also missed it.

“I want women in our caucus to be treated with respect — and I want them to have a voice,” Cantwell said Tuesday when asked about the dispute between Leahy and Klobuchar. While Cantwell acknowledged that male senators often confront other male senators, “if I feel like someone is trying to push one of our [female] colleagues, I’m going to say something about it.”

Leahy and Klobuchar downplayed the dispute Tuesday. The senior senator from Vermont wrote in an email that he worked with Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Murray — along with Klobuchar — to break the impasse.

About the blogger

Bob Collins has been with Minnesota Public Radio since 1992, emigrating to Minnesota from Massachusetts. He was senior editor of news in the ’90s, ran MPR’s political unit, created the MPR News regional website, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day laments that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.

NewsCut is a blog featuring observations about the news. It provides a forum for an online discussion and debate about events that might not typically make the front page. NewsCut posts are not news stories.